Remainders of the Day
Shaun Bythell
Profile, £16.99, 377 pages
Once Upon A Tome
Oliver Darkshire
Bantam Press, £14.99, 244 pages
Graham Greene was not merely the 20th century’s most assured chronicler of Catholic guilt, but perhaps the most ardent author-bibliophile that there has ever been. Not only did he take a perverse delight in inscribing copies of his books that he discovered by chance in far-flung locations – making them impossibly desirable for whichever unsuspecting collector came across them – but he himself built up a magnificent library of association copies that is now retained by the Burns Library in Boston, Massachusetts.
Unlike many authors, Greene took delight in the rough-and-tumble world of second-hand bookshops and their proprietors, and even contributed an introduction to the autobiography of the bookseller and collector David Low, “With All Faults”, in which he wrote that “Second-hand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.”
Half a century after Greene wrote that, and three decades after his death, he would weep into his Beaujolais to see what has happened to the second-hand bookselling profession. It has been caught up in a perfect storm of trouble that has turned it from a thriving industry that could be found in just about any small town or village to a minority pursuit that tends to be practised only by the wealthy, the indefatigable or the insane.
The competition offered by charity bookshops – which have no staff or acquisition costs, and generous tax breaks – is the major reason for their disappearance, but the rise of the internet has meant that any amateur can buy (or, more often, sell) books from their bedroom and no longer needs either a premises or years of experience to offer their wares. Finally, the extortionate cost of premises has meant that many bookshops have been forced out of business, and their unworldly owners sent blinking into the harsh reality of unemployment.
It is, however, a mistake to be entirely negative about the profession. Although countless shops have closed down over the past two decades, many still exist and continue to supply everything from welcome doses of eccentricity to book-buyers to (if they must) rare and beautiful books of breathtakingly high prices to well-heeled collectors. Their proprietors, or staff, tend to be literate, witty and (inevitably) bookish types, although of course there are still those who combine oddness of near-psychopathic hue with a misanthropy that will send all but the most determined collector out of their shop, empty-handed and quivering.
There have been several bibliophile-authors who have followed in Low’s footsteps over the past decades; John Baxter and Rick Gekoski have both written hugely entertaining memoirs about their lives in books. Yet it is Shaun Bythell, proprietor of The Bookshop in Wigtown, who has perhaps the highest profile of any general bookseller in Britain today, thanks to a series of bestselling accounts of his life in Scotland’s self-designated book town as the owner of its largest and best-known shop. His first book, Diary of A Bookseller, was much praised for its combination of surreal humour (Bythell keeps a Kindle that he has blasted with a shotgun in a prominent position by the till of The Bookshop), unsentimental accounts of the financial difficulties of running an independent establishment and, perhaps most of all, Bythell’s half-affectionate, half-exasperated portraits of his eccentric customers and staff, who seem to vie with one another to confound and baffle him.
The excellently-titled Remainders of the Day is the third in Bythell’s diaries to be published and, although it does not finish anywhere near the present time, has a sadly valedictory air to it. Online orders dominate business, which means that a falling-out with Amazon threatens to be financially disastrous; book browsers are sparse, and ever-more curmudgeonly and demanding. Meanwhile the threat of potential ruin hangs over Wigtown, which even the jollier evenings of alcohol-induced merriment in local pubs cannot obscure.
Although Bythell is an enjoyable dyspeptic guide to the peculiarities and strange rituals of bookselling – in how many other professions is it normal to pay a stranger who has turned up unannounced at your premises with the contents of a cardboard box? – it is hard not to wonder whether this will be the last volume that he produces, not least because of the ever-present fear of diminishing returns from his continually enjoyable books. There would be a cosmic irony if Remainders of the Day itself ended up piled high in the remainder bins.
Bythell writes: “I doubt that the second-hand book trade is made up of a greater number of misers than any other business, but perhaps because very few of us make more than a subsistence living from it … we are quite visible to our customers in our morose, unsociable shabbiness.” Dylan Moran’s alcoholic bookseller Bernard Black in the sitcom Black Books might have once been seen as an absurd caricature of the profession, but if Bythell is to be believed, it is now a piece of closely observed social realism.
That said, it is easy to dismiss provincial booksellers when compared to their smart metropolitan counterparts. The likes of Pet-er Harrington and Maggs, which specialise in selling immaculate copies of dustjacketed first editions, are less bookdealers and more literary matchmakers, pairing fine examples of literature with grateful owners. Which is why the young bookseller Oliver Darkshire’s memoir – with the similarly punning title Once Upon A Tome – is both enjoyable and perhaps a suggestion of things to come in the industry.
Darkshire is, by his own admission, hardly a typical antiquarian bookseller. As he writes early on, “there are very few job positions open for a 20-year-old with a bad attitude and no higher education, and unfortunately almost all of these involve dealing with the general public in one manner or another”. He arrives at the Dickensian Sotheran’s in Piccadilly, London, virtually by accident, after a failed stint as a legal factotum, and swiftly discovers that eccentricity of person and manner, far from being a drawback, is practically a prerequisite of employment.
He finds his niche managing the shop’s social media feed in a suitably quixotic fashion, and the book has much the same tone of faux-naïve blinking and absurdity, interspersed with welcome shafts of dark wit. At one point, Darkshire writes that “most antiquarian booksellers have a deep-seated fear of well-meaning academics”. Add this to rot, damp, shoplifters, customers of most kinds and, for what it’s worth, the shock of the new.
Yet evolution has been inevitable for some time. As Darkshire suggests, “bookshops that refuse to change at all routinely collapse and vanish into the torrent of history”. We may yet see a new breed of savvy, socially-conscious booksellers emerging, with an eye on posterity (and book deals). The Second Shelf in Soho only sells books by female writers; specialist children’s, religious and travel bookshops still thrive. While we might bemoan the end of the bookish affair that Greene so revelled in, we should take heart from the rise of a new generation of booksellers, of which Bythell and Darkshire are merely the most visible, and hope for the best, rather than fearing for the collapse of this particular branch of the literary industry.
Alexander Larman’s new book, The Windsors at War, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in March 2023
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.